Civilian Bystander Also Wounded in Blast Near Mosque

Bombing attacks continue to be a favored tactic of rebel factions in Syria’s ongoing civil war, and Asaad Muhanna, the head of the Damascus Governor’s Office, was assassinated today in a bombing attack against his car.

Reports from the Syrian state media indicate that rebels rigged a bomb to the underside of Muhanna’s car while it was parked in the Mashru Dummar district, near a mosque. It was detonated, apparently remotely, when Muhanna attempted to drive away.

The blast killed Muhanna and wounded a bystander who was walking nearby. It also caused what was reported to be “significant” damage in the area. No group has yet claimed credit for the attack.

Rebels have favored the use of bombing attacks, particularly in Damascus, for the past several months, as a way to underscore their ability to cause damage in the heart of the Syrian government’s remaining territory. Though difficult to detect, the bombings have the downside of causing civilian casualties, sometimes in large numbers.

It is also a "down side" to kill a civil official of a country that has always been the bulwark of anti-imperial Arabism. __Fomenting sectarian conflict has always been the favored tactic of Western imperialism in the Arab Middle East since the days of the British and French mandates. Now the US is doing the same thing through Sunni sectarian proxies to Syria – destroying it – that it did to Iraq through invasion and an occupation that favored Shi-i sectarian proxies (though the big joke on the neocons is that those were really proxies of Iran, not the US). The only thing that can save Syria from prolonged sectarian conflict and ultimate disintegration is for the Syrian government to win this war, precisely because Ba'thism, like any truly Arab political ideology, has as its goal the unity of all Arabic speaking states, is anti-imperial, anti-sectarian and anti-tribal. The proxy army in Syria is the opposite of all these things_, and hence, nothing but a booby-trapped tool of imperialism whose blowback will do worse damage to the US in the end than a unified and independent Arabia could ever do. __At least Churchill's Middle East "empire on the cheap" used reliable tools, apart from the Zionists, of course.